Hi,
Some of our faculty members have requested we provide them the R statistical
package. I used the r-2.1.1-20050625.src.rpm package in "current". This
built fine, but encountered some problems when installing add-on packages at
runtime using the "install.packages()" function. I fixed one problem (and
will submit the fix in a while), but have now encountered a philosophical
problem I need some advice on how best to handle.
Some of these add-on packages are actually built from source by R. You
invoke R, and from its command prompt, you type in, say,
'install.packages(c("MCMCpack"))'. This invokes a script that downloads the
package from the Carnegie CRAN site, unpacks the tar.gz file, calls
"configure", "make", and "make install". The directories appear to be set
correctly; it is the libraries that are the problem in some cases.
In the case of MCMCpack, it uses the g++ compiler, and needs the
libstdc++.so library. OpenPKG's gcc rpm only provides libstdc++.a, due to
its policy of creating only static libraries. So the build fails.
Manually changing the MCMCpack bundle is not a good solution since any user
that installs our R binary rpm on their local machine is free to invoke the
install.packages() function at any time to download and install the latest
version of their favorite R add-on package. Therefore I would not have
control over those versions. Furthermore, install.packages() requires that
you download the package from an internet source (R offers you a list of
about 50 mirror sites), so I can't tell it to install a modified add-on
package from our repository.
Since this problem is due to gcc being built with static libraries, I wanted
to ask this forum what the party line is for such a case. Is it that we
cannot support this functionality in R? That would be an unpopular choice
among our users.
Is there any thought to removing the static library restriction anytime
soon?
Thanks,
Dennis
Dennis McRitchie
Computational Science and Engineering Support (CSES)
Academic Services Department
Office of Information Technology
Princeton University
______________________________________________________________________
The OpenPKG Project www.openpkg.org
Developer Communication List openpkg-dev@openpkg.org
